EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT: Down to My Soul

Excerpt

“You’re awfully quiet back there.” Kai burrows her back deeper into my chest, looking up over one shoulder, her smile brighter than the dim lamp light.

I fold the length of her hair over one shoulder, baring a stretch of naked skin to feather kisses down her neck and between her shoulder blades. She flips onto her back, reaching up to brush the hair out of my eyes. Without skipping a beat, I shift my kisses to the front, dusting across her collarbone. I open my mouth wide over her breast, laving the nipple with my tongue until she arches up, her breath hitching and her fingers clenching at my scalp.

“Your nipples are absolutely perfect,” I mumble into the underside of her breast. “Have I ever told you that?”

“Once, twice, five, maybe seven times.” She laughs, her Southern drawl even slower, her breath still jagged, nipples tight and wet under my tongue.

“But that was in the throes of passion.” I dip to kiss the tattooed prayer wrapping around her ribs. “I’m saying it completely sober, so you know it’s true. Not in the throes.”

“Will you stop saying throes? No one say throes.”

“I just said it.” I lift my head, teasing her with a glance. “You’re saying I invented the word throes?”

“No, not invented, just that people don’t use the word…” She rolls her eyes. “Shut up and get back to my nipples. You were saying?”

My hands roam her flat stomach and one sleekly muscled thigh. This girl and her dancer’s legs are gonna be the death of me. I flip her back onto her side and spoon my body around hers until that tight ass is pressed against me as I reach around to cup her breasts. I know she’s self-conscious about them.

“How could you ever think these breasts were anything less than perfect?”

“They’re tiny,” she whispers. “Most men—”

“Don’t matter since I’m the only one who’ll ever see them.” A horrible thought blackens my brain and I turn her onto her back again. “Pep, you still want to act?”

“You know I do. Eventually. Malcolm already has an acting coach lined up.”

Fucking Malcolm. Not even going there.

“I mean, you know you can’t do nudity, right?”

“Rhyson,” she groans. “Don’t you dare start with this.”

“And no sex scenes.” Okay. Compromise. “I mean I guess, kissing is okay. Like closed-mouthed kissing.”

She turns those tilted eyes my way wearing her “gimme a break” face.

“Name the last movie you saw with closed-mouthed kissing, no nudity, and no sex scenes, Rhys. In recent memory! A Wonderful Life doesn’t count.”

I mull that over because there’s gotta be something she can do.

“Frozen.” I can barely get it around the laugh swelling in my throat. “They had it on the plane.”

“Dude, you just said Frozen.”

“That’s it. I just solved our problem. Animation. You’d make a great Pocahontas. Or who was that other one? Mulan?”

“Diverse Disney princesses.” Her shoulders shake with the laugh. “That’s what you’re leaving me? And by the way, you don’t have to physically resemble animated characters to play them.”

“But it would lend a certain authenticity, don’t you think?”

“We’re not having this discussion any time soon.”

“Animation could be a great way to ease into acting, Pep. I think you should consider it. Because if you start acting before you’re good, I’ll rotten tomato you.”

“You would rotten tomato your own girlfriend?”

I shrug, turning down the corners of my mouth and linking my hands behind my head.

“If you suck, you’d leave me no choice.”

“If you rotten tomato me, I’ll never give you another blow job.”

Even knowing she’s pulling my chain, my heart stops for a second at the possibility of those lips never wrapped around my cock again.

“You, my lady, are the most powerful woman in the universe.”

She laughs so hard she curls her legs up and grips her stomach under the sheet.

“Blow jobs make me the most powerful woman in the whole universe?”

I lift up on an elbow, turned on my side, pushing the hair back from her face.

“Nope. Just in mine.”

Our eyes hold until the laughter evaporates.

“You’re crazy, but I adore you,” she whispers. “You know that?”

When someone says they adore you, it’s like love with a heap of cherries on top. You could love someone and kind of hate them. But to adore them, you have to like them a lot. And still it seems a pretty flimsy word to describe what I feel for this girl.

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